DORIE GREENSPAN

Chocolate Chip Cookies: Kid's Play, Happiness and a Recipe

 

In my book, Baking From My Home to Yours, I tell the story (page 139) of going to a luncheon and being surprised to find that the dessert that was passed around was mine!  In fact, the whole experience was surprising from beginning to end, since the hostess didn’t know that the recipe was mine and the chef had no idea I’d be at the lunch.  For me, it was an incredible treat – and an honor:  I was thrilled that the chef liked the cookies enough to put them on the menu.

Actually, it’s very rare that I get to taste any of my recipes made by other people.  I know people make them – friends call and you, my wonderful friends in the blogosphere, write – but generally they don’t make them for me, which is one reason why last night’s dessert, a variation on My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies, was so special.  The other reason was that the cookies were made, from start to finish, with only one or two fatherly assists, by Mitchell, a 9-year-old with definite tastes.

Because Mitchell knows what he likes, he made some decisions about the recipe.  He wanted chocolate-chip cookies, but he didn’t want “plain” cookies, so he made a Playing Around variation, Cocoa Chocolate Chip Cookies.  He likes cookies softer than crisper, so he made his a little bigger and baked them a tad less.  Because he loves cookies when the chips are gooey, he served them warm.  Finally, because he’s as busy as the rest of us, he made the dough ahead of time, shaped it into balls, refrigerated the mounds, and then popped them on the baking sheet and slid them into the oven just as we were finishing our main course. 

The cookies were a hit all around: we all loved them; I was delighted beyond measure to see Mitchell make them; and Mitchell was, like all of us bakers, so happy that he had made everyone around the table happy. It was the perfect end to a great evening.

COCOA CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Adapted from Baking From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan

Makes about 45 cookies

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon salt (go for 1 1/4 teaspoons if you really like salt)

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 cup sugar

2/3 cup (packed) light brown sugar

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 large eggs

12 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chips, or 2 cups storebought chocolate chips or chunks

1 cup finely chopped walnuts or pecans

Getting ready:  Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.  Line two baking sheets with parchment or silicone mats.

Whisk together the flour, cocoa, salt and baking soda and keep close at hand.

Working in a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter on medium speed for about 1 minute, until smooth.  Add the sugars and beat for another 2 minutes or so, until well blended.  Beat in the vanilla.  Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat for 1 minute after each egg goes in.  Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the dry ingredients in 3 portions, mixing only until each addition is incorporated.  On low speed, or by hand with a rubber spatula, mix in the chocolate and nuts.  (The dough can be covered and refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen.  If you’d like, you can freeze rounded tablespoons of dough, ready for baking.  There’s no need to defrost before baking – just add another minute or two to the baking time.)

Spoon the dough by slightly rounded tablespoonfuls onto the baking sheets, leaving about 2 inches between spoonfuls. 

Bake the cookies – one sheet at a time and rotating the sheet at the midway point – for 10 to 12 minutes, or until they are set around the edges; they may still be a little soft in the middle, and that's just fine.  Pull the sheet from the oven and allow the cookies to rest for 1 minute, then carefully, using a wide metal spatula, transfer them to racks to cool to room temperature.

Repeat with the remainder of the dough, cooling the baking sheets between batches.

A Furi of Sharpness: Keeping Knives in Shape

I am not a competitive person.  For proof ask The Kid, who used to get so annoyed with me because I wouldn’t play checkers – capturing men upset me and having my men captured upset me even more.  So it’s not out of competitiveness, but rather a sense of tickledness, that I say, “I beat Rachel Ray!”  Well, I beat her at only one thing, but I beat her by a fair measure: I had my fabulous FuriTechnics TechEdge Pro Knife Sharpening System before she did.  Okay, she’s got her name on it now and now the sharpener comes in RR’s signature orange, but so what?  I’ve probably had sharper knives longer than she has!  (That's an RR version in the photo; my original model is in Connecticut.)

Actually, I saw the sharpener when its Australian designer, Mark Henry, was touring America with his prototype and for me it was love at first sight.  At last, I, who in addition to being non-competitive am a coward when it comes to handling lethal objects, could have sharp, sharp knives without having to use the dreaded steel or the gotta-get-it-precisely-right-or-you’ll-ruin-your-knives stone.

The sharpener – more technically, the system – looks like a lyrical piece of modern sculpture.  The curved part is a hand-protecting base with a clever contraption that holds the removable business ends of the system, all of them designed to be foolproof (ie, you don’t have to adjust a thing).  There’s a restorer that gets the angle on your knife into just-so condition; a springy diamond-coated sharpener; and a honer, which I think of as a polisher and use everyday – actually, several times I day:  whenever I pull down a knife, I give it a couple of slides through the honing gizmo. 

Good tools make me happy (I’m sure I’ve said this before) and I find cutting with a sharp knife a pleasure, efficient too:  sharp knives cut faster and everything they cut looks better.  This might sound ridiculous, but I think that even if your knife skills aren’t Iron-Chef worthy, you end up feeling better about your cutting chops when your knives are sharp  - at least I do. 

Even More Licorice: Maybe it's a trend!

You know how when you were a little kid, you’d learn a new word and then, almost magically, you’d see it and hear it everywhere? Well that’s kind of the way I’m feeling about licorice these days. Ever since I started paying attention to it, it’s everywhere. 

Here’s my latest, fresh from this afternoon's lunch, absolutely fabulous, licorice sighting:

It's a slim round of chocolate cake topped with chocolate ice cream, salted-caramel chantilly and pine-nut-brittle powder, and finished with a sweeping swish of coal-dark black-licorice syrup! The dessert is from Johnny Iuzzini, the pastry chef at Jean-Georges in New York City, and it’s inspired.

A Time to Plant

It's Memorial Day Weekend and while I plan to do the most traditional Memorial Day activity - grill - tomorrow, today I did the second-most-traditional thing:  I went plant shopping! 

We used to get our herbs, tomatoes and annuals into the garden around Mother's Day (two weeks ago), but I was gone then and this is the first time I've been to Connecticut in three weeks, so at the of top of the to-do list was a spree.  The rows and rows of herbs et al in the two nurseries we went to were a little picked over, but there was still enough to make a city-girl's heart go pitter-patter and more than enough to fill two wagons:

Among the things I brought home were:

• Basil - of course, and including lots of regular, opal, spicy globe and Magic Michael, irresistible because of its name; I'm still looking for Thai basil - hope I'm not too late
• Tomatoes - big, small, round, long, red, yellow and striped; I really hope the Marzano tomatoes grow and thrive,  so I can have great sauce all winter
• Peppers - mostly chiles, mostly hot
• Rosemary - a lot of rosemary to plant along the south wall with the lavender, which wintered over beautifully; together the rosemary and lavender make me think I've got a tad of the South-of-France in New England
• Bay Leaf - one of my favorite things in a garden; there's nothing like being able to pull a leaf off the plant just when the stew is going into the oven or when you're about to make moules mariniere
• Thyme - including lemon and silver
• Marjoram - which always makes me think of oregano and makes me wonder every year why the oregano always winters over and the marjoram never does
• Mint - peppermint, spearmint and chocolate mint (which we'll keep in pots, so that they won't take over the entire garden)
• Scented Geraniums - strawberry, apple and a fabulous lemon-rose; I'm going to use them in pound cakes this summer
• Patchouli - so summer of love, so intoxicating
• Lemongrass - which will grab an entire corner of the garden, but be worth it
• Lemon Verbena- big, aromatic, wonderful in tisanes and so good with fish

There's much more, more than enough to fill the empty patches left by winter.  Actually, given how harsh our winters are here, I'm always amazed at how much of the garden survives covered by frost and weighed down by snow.  Yes, yes,  I know that that's why the survivors are called perennials, but I still think it borders on the miraculous. Here's the spring garden with nothing new planted in it:

By next week all the holes will be filled - except the ones the chipmunks burrow.  Aarrrgh.  How can creatures that are so cute be so destructive?!

Dutch Parrano: How cool?????

Yesterday, following the advice of a cheeseman at Fairway, I bought this wedge of Dutch Parrano, a cheese I’d never had – actually, a cheese I’d never heard of.  My plan was to serve it, along with olives, sausages and salted almonds, with drinks before dinner, then I completely forgot to pull it out of the fridge.  (Also forgotten was the fennel and apple salad, but that’s another story.)

We just drove up to Connecticut and I thought I’d cut up the cheese so we could munch it while making dinner.  On first taste it seemed like a perfectly pleasant - okay, not distinctive - cheese, but I must have underestimated it big time because, according to Fairway's description of my purchase - are you ready for this? - I had bought: 

                        “The hippest cheese in New York.” 

Hip.  Hip.  My cheese is hip!  I'm dying to know:  Is Dutch Parrano hip where you live? 

Bartolotta's in Las Vegas: A Wynn-ing Dinner

People go to Las Vegas for many things, among them volcanoes that erupt on schedule, gondoliers that speak your language, pirate ships with friendly pirates, shopping malls the size of Texas and casinos that never, ever close, even at the airport.  Me?  I think I might have come to this desert town for the fish.  More specifically, the fish at Bartolotta’s, Paul Bartolotta’s very Italian fisheria built around a huge koi pond in the Wynn Hotel. 

I hadn’t had Paul’s food for years – I’d last had a Bartolotta morsel too, too many years ago when Spiaggia opened in Chicago – so I made a reservation at his restaurant as soon as I booked my flight.  Trained in Italy and France, Paul is a master technician with the soul of a small-town papa who just wants his family to eat well and be happy.

Of course, in Las Vegas, there’s a steep price to be paid for eating well and being happy, but you leave Paul’s make-believe corner of Italy thinking it was worth it.  Bartolotta’s is single-mindedly fishcentric and single-handedly responsible for bringing in a variety of swimmers usually seen only in the markets of Venice and Portofino.

At Bartolotta’s, the tasting menu, which is what we had, is served family style.  First there’s a cart with all the fish laid out like a still life and you get to see what the day’s catch is and can choose what you’d like, then you settle in and the surprises start coming.  I didn’t take pictures – sorry – and my notes are pretty bad (sometimes dinner is just dinner and I thought this was one of those times, but when it turned out to be so great, I wanted to tell you all about it), but here’s some of what we had.

Antipasti – each fish was prepared very simply; some, like the incredible slipper lobster, were just cooked and cut into pieces; all were outstanding

• Mantis shrimp
• Langoustines
• Slipper lobster (what a treat – not at all like Maine lobsters; small – they take 3 years to grow to 1 pound, very sweet and beautifully tender)
• Silver fish (teensy, snackable, whole fish, fried and served with lemon wedges)
• Octopus
• Clams

Pasta

• Risotto nero (made with squid ink)
• Ravioli (with ricotta, pecorino, butter and tomatoes – so simple, so amazingly good)
• Lasagnette con crostacei (shreds of lasagna with shrimp, lobster, langoustines, crabs and white wine – my favorite of the pastas)
• Penne with spiny lobster

The Main Event

• Turbot with shrimp, langoustines and fat asparagus

Dessert

• Gelato and Sorbetto in many flavors

It was truly a memorable meal – and a really long one too.  We had a late reservation, but by the time we finished dinner and had some good catch-up time with Paul, it was past 2 am – a late finish even in a town that’s 24/7!  But you’d never know it looking at this picture of the chef.  Proof again that while it takes talent to be a great chef, it also takes more energy than most of us ordinary humans can muster!

Las Vegas: A Neophyte's First Day

I’m in Las Vegas for the first time in my life and I’m getting a great foodie introduction to the city. 

I wrote this yesterday and meant to post it sooner, but since I arrived on Thursday I seem to have gained three hours on the clock and lost all sense of time in my mind.  I'm traveling with my guys, Michael, my husband, and Joshua, The Kid – think of them as The Entourage - and snapped this picture from the window of our room on the 36th floor of The Wynn as soon as we checked in.  The white block in the center may look like a drive-in movie screen, but it's a water wall.

Without even unpacking, we grabbed a cab and headed out of town, an odd thing to do when every super-chef on the planet is in town, but you’ve got to leave the Strip to get what I was after:  Thai food at Lotus of Siam.

Unless you know about this place – and lots of people do – you certainly wouldn’t be drawn to it by its dingy storefront or its prime location in a strip mall with more acupuncturists and martial arts studios than food joints.  And the worn tables and chairs, 1950s-neighborhood-Chinese-restaurant look and steam tables with the all-you-can-eat-8-buck buffet don’t look promising either.  But press on, it’s worth it.

I’m not an expert on Thai food and the menu is extensive, so we were glad to have a waiter who, despite the bustling lunch-hour crowd demanding attention, was happy to spend time with us and help us decide on lunch.  He also helped us figure out the level of spiciness we wanted – we went for 4, with 1 being the mildest and 10 the hottest (cowards, I know), and it was just right for us.  Who knows how many Singha beers would have drunk had we notched it up?

Among the dishes we had, which included a warm shrimp salad with ample lemongrass, great fish cakes with a dipping sauce I would have been happy to buy by the caseload, and a bamboo-shoot curry, my two favorites were this dish of crispy rice with bits of spicy sausage, which doesn’t look like much, but grabbed me enough that I wanted to have it for breakfast the next morning

and this masterful dish of striped bass, which had been cut, batter-dipped and perfectly fried, then laid over a bed of soft, wide noodles and topped with plenty of fried mint. 

The fish was so expertly cooked that any Michelin-three-star chef would have been proud to claim it as his own. And speaking of Michelin-three-starrers, there was a picture of Joel Robuchon on the restaurant's extensive wall of fame.  He looked so happy that I was sure he, too, had had the sea bass.

I’m going to skip over Thursday night’s dinner at Michael Mina's StripSteak at the Mandalay Bay, not because it wasn’t memorable – you’ve got to love a place that’s re-thought steak and decided that certain cuts, like the porterhouse and standing rib, should be poached in butter in a kind of sous-vide process before they’re grilled over mesquite – but because this post would be endless and I have to tell you about Friday morning.

So now it’s Friday (or it was when I wrote this) – not that you can tell one day from another here – and I spent the morning at the Bellagio with Jean-Phillippe Maury, the hotel’s executive pastry chef, whom I introduced and played sidekick to for 80 Bon Appetit readers who were clever enough to sign up early for our chocolate seminar.

A tad of background:  Jean-Phillippe, who grew up in the south of France, passed the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (best worker in France) competition when he was 28, had his own pastry shop, worked with Francois Payard in New York for a year, and came to Las Vegas to open the Bellagio.  A year and a half ago, he opened Jean-Phillippe Patisserie in the hotel and put this town on the sweet map.  He and his 70 – count them! – pastry cooks and bakers turn out 15,000 things a day and, impossible as it is to believe, what they turn out is as good as what you get in a tiny patisserie of the highest order in France.  I don’t know how, but he’s managed to artisanalize what is essentially mass production.  And, did I mention that, in addition to being hyper-talented, he’s adorable? 

If the Bellagio didn’t hire him because he’s so photogenic, maybe they should have – everyone who was at the event wanted to get a picture with him, including me.

The three desserts Jean-Phillipe demoed, were:

• Chocolate Tiramisu: J-P made a tempered marbled chocolate cup (he dipped balloons into the chocolate, let the chocolate set, then popped the balloons) and filled it with a chocolate-mascarpone-rum cream and tiny rounds of coffee-soaked ladyfinger cake

• Caramelized Bananas and Chocolate Mousse: layered in a shot class (another instance of dessert in a verrine)

• Milk Chocolate Napoleon: on a hazelnut dacquoise (a meringue sponge cake), J-P layered a mix of milk chocolate, praline and crushed crepe-cookies, discs of tempered dark chocolate and swirls of milk-chocolate mousse (it reminded me of Pierre Herme’s Plaisir Sucre, which is also based on milk chocolate, a not-very-French choice)

When tastes were handed out, there was a surprise: Jean-Phillippe had created an all-chocolate “plate” to hold the three treats.

The presentation was so over-the-top wonderful that no one wanted to eat it, so the “seminarians” left with their desserts in a bag.  They also left with some chocolate bonbons from Jean-Phillippe Maury and big smiles.

This was the kind of event after which you say, “A good time was had by all.”

Certainly I had a great time.  I love to watch talented people work and Jean-Phillippe is a patissier with talent to burn.  I also got to tour the kitchens with the chef and, standing in the middle of the huge space and breathing in the fragrances of melting butter, rising yeast dough and oranges candying in sugar syrup, I remembered again what makes me happiest: kitchens, the people in them and the stuff the people make!

Like everyone else, I left with a smile.  But I also left with some chocolates: 

Taxi: A New York Story

Getting a taxi during New York’s morning rush hour has the feel of high-stakes gambling.  You’ve got to figure the odds on the time you get out on the street and the street corner you pick to do your hailing, then you’ve got to consider how many other caffeine-charged, neurotic New Yorkers might have made the same calculations.  It’s a hassle and, fortunately for me, one I don’t usually have to face, since most days I work at home in fuzzy slippers.

But yesterday morning I had an 8 am meeting at The Cupcake Café and had to jump into civvies and join the combative hordes smack-dab in the middle of cab-crunch time – that’s when there isn’t an empty taxi in sight and the streets are clogged with people who are sweet as neighbors, but killers as competitive cab-grabbers. 

For the first futile 10 minutes I had the corner to myself, then I was joined by two high-school girls late for class and looking for a ride.  Their parents had brought these kids up right because instead of doing the New York thing – which is to walk half a block uptown, so that you get a cab before it reaches the corner – they asked if I was taxi hunting and said they’d wait until I nabbed one.

As it turned out, we were all going in the same direction so, agreeing to share a ride, we each waved our hands furiously and finally attracted a “town car”, a car that usually only serves private clients, but might, for a negotiated fee, take a passerby.  I opened the door to start my haggling and was so surprised when the driver called out, “Hi Arielle! Hi Johanna!”  He knew my new-found wards.

It wasn’t until the kids jumped out that the driver told me that for many years he’d been the security guard at their school and knew them since they were little.  It also turned out that the only reason I got the ride this morning was because of them – he wanted to do them a favor.

But the story doesn’t end here.  The lovely driver in the spanking clean car (so different from a city cab) took me further downtown, stopped the car, ran around to my side to open my door (a service I’ve never seen performed by a NY cabbie in all my years of living here), helped me out and then wouldn’t take a penny for the ride.  “It’s a gorgeous day – enjoy it,” he said.

What a guy!  He saved the day for me – I was never going to get to that meeting on time without him – and he renewed my faith in the kindness of strangers.  All that and it still wasn’t even 8am!

The Secret to Cooking? Cook More

That’s Patricia Wells and me having a little backstage moment – and a little sip of wine – before a recent discussion that I moderated at the Alliance Francaise in New York.

Patricia is crisscrossing America talking about Vegetable Harvest, her tenth volume and a must-have book that gives pride of plate to all that grows.  There are 200 remarkably simple recipes created to show off each vegetable and, no, the book’s not vegetarian, it’s deliciously vegecentric.

To read about the really good advice Patricia had for new cooks, CLICK HERE.

(If you're clicking after Monday, May 20, go to posts for the Week of May 13.)

Toronto: 60 Good Hours

The high point of my time in Toronto was Friday’s all-too-quick lunch with Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice, that afternoon’s drinks with Rob of Hungry in Hogtown, Saturday’s tour of the St. Lawrence Market with Rob and his wife, Rachel, and that afternoon’s leisurely lunch with Brilynn of Jumbo Empanadas and her mom.    Of course, there was no question these terrific bloggers would all be smart, interesting and passionate about food, but they’re also really warm and funny and great company too.  I was so glad to meet them and so happy that they could sneak away from their “real” lives to come see me. 

Here’s a picture of Bri and me at the Sante/Bon Appetit Festival.  I couldn’t believe that she and her mom drove so long and so far so that we could meet, but there’s no way I could have been happier. 

The lowpoint of Friday was my little mishap on Canada AM, the country’s nationwide morning news television show.  There I was, on camera with Beverly, the host, who often bakes with her two young children, making the Toasted Almond Scones, when, in a burst of exuberance, I knocked over the open bottle of almond extract!  It wasn’t quite the same as when Julia dropped a roast beef, but it did kind of unsettle things – mostly me.  However, Beverly and I got a giggle out of it when, at the end of the segment, the show’s team came on set to nibble the scones as well as the Lemon-Poppy Seed Muffins and Blueberry Crunch Cake, which ace food stylist, Heather Trim, had prepped, and one of the anchors, oblivious to our mishap, took a bit of a scone and said, “Wow!  What a great almond aroma it has!”  Well yeah.  And it was the same almond aroma I sported all day, since my little blue top had been soaked with the stuff.

Here’s a snap of what the set looked like pre almond-turn-over and the crew’s happy munching.

In between, there was a short walk around downtown and a long dinner at the new Colburn Lane, where the chef did a 10-ish-course tasting menu for us in which, late in the meal, there was a Pekin duck breast in a thick, sticky burnt-honey and licorice sauce!  Licorice-loving me thought the sauce was inspired.  Then, the next night, at a very late-night dinner at Coca, there was duck with caramelized black Moroccan olives (great!) and licorice again, this time added to the light duck jus.

Here’s the duck-and-licorice from Colburn Lane – sorry it’s not a better shot, but I’m not very good at getting a good picture in a quirkily lit restaurant at 12:30 am.

I should have gotten more pictures of my Saturday-morning market tour with Rob and Rachel, but I was too busy ogling the wild garlic and equally wild leeks, the season’s first morels, the suckling pigs and rabbits, local sausages of all kinds, Greek yogurt, artisanal feta and peameal, a.k.a. Canadian bacon.  Our market breakfast was a few warm slices of the bacon on a puffy roll squirted with an ample amount of mustard.  Eaten outside at a picnic table, it was swell!

And speaking of mustard, there’s Kozlik’s, the hometown favorite.  There must have been 15 varieties on display and I think I tasted them all and, had my suitcase been less packed, I would have taken them all home.  I also would have taken home Tom Green, the adorable mustard man:

And there was my demo of World Peace Cookies and Rum-Drenched Vanilla Loaf Cakes (both from Baking From My Home to Yours) in a park, not the easiest venue, especially because it didn’t have a heat source.  But since Daniel et Daniel, a great Toronto caterer, had done the sweets ahead and organized the mise-en-place, it really wasn’t an issue – until we discovered that the butter, which needed to be melted so it could be folded into the loaf cake batter, was still in hunks.  No problem – Steven and Ron just put the bowl over the kerosene heater that had been set up to keep little me warm while signing books!  Ah necessity, the sweet mother of invention.  Thanks guys! 

When I got ready to leave Toronto this morning, here’s what I was squeezing into my suitcase:

I couldn’t buy all the mustards, but I couldn’t resist these:

Presents from Cream Puff Ivonne, all local, all delicious:

A tease of what’s to come: 

My friend Cari Gray of Butterfield & Robinson, the company that leads some of the world’s most amazing bicycle tours, left these for me.  I’m hoping I’ll be putting them to use soon when I join B&R as the resident foodie on one of their tours next year.  More when I know more.

And, of course, there are the great memories – stuff that’s unpackable.